Two hundred and twenty acres of corn in the field, thirty-five acres of wheat, and nine hundred and eighty-six head of live stock! [What a singularly intelligent army we had in those days, according to Mr. Floyd – though not according to the Congress of 1832.]
So Mr. Floyd decided that the Government was not responsible for that $3,200 worth of rubbish which the Indians destroyed, but was responsible for the property destroyed by the troops – which property consisted of (I quote from the printed United States Senate document):
Dollars
Corn at Bassett’s Creek…………… 3,00
Cattle………………………….. 5,000
Stock hogs………………………. 1,050
Drove hogs………………………. 1,204
Wheat…………………………… 350
Hides…………………………… 4,00
Corn on the Alabama River…………. 3,500
Total………….18,104
That sum, in his report, Mr. Floyd calls the “full value of the property destroyed by the troops.”
He allows that sum to the starving Fishers, together with interest from 1813. From this new sum total the amounts already paid to the Fishers were deducted, and then the cheerful remainder (a fraction under forty thousand dollars) was handed to them, and again they retired to Florida in a condition of temporary tranquillity. Their ancestor’s farm had now yielded them altogether nearly sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash.
6. Does the reader suppose that that was the end of it? Does he suppose those diffident Fishers were satisfied? Let the evidence show. The Fishers were quiet just two years. Then they came swarming up out of the fertile swamps of Florida with their same old documents, and besieged Congress once more. Congress capitulated on the 1st of June, 1860, and instructed Mr. Floyd to overhaul those papers again, and pay that bill. A Treasury clerk was ordered to go through those papers and report to Mr. Floyd what amount was still due the emaciated Fishers. This clerk (I can produce him whenever he is wanted) discovered what was apparently a glaring and recent forgery in the papers; whereby a witness’s testimony as to the price of corn in Florida in 1813 was made to name double the amount which that witness had originally specified as the price! The clerk not only called his superior’s attention to this thing, but in making up his brief of the case called particular attention to it in writing. That part of the brief never got before Congress, nor has Congress ever yet had a hint of forgery existing among the Fisher papers. Nevertheless, on the basis of the double prices (and totally ignoring the clerk’s assertion that the figures were manifestly and unquestionably a recent forgery), Mr. Floyd remarks in his new report that “the testimony, particularly in regard to the corn crops,